The Walking Dead
by xahra99
Summary: Eric and Godric slaughter their way across America in the 1700s. One shot. Complete.


The Walking Dead

A True Blood fan fiction by xahra99

The house was silent, but it wasn't empty.

David Keil gripped a skinning knife in one white-knuckled hand. He slid his right foot forwards across the floorboards. His boot bumped against something soft and yielding, and he forced himself not to think about what the object could be. There would be time to grieve once he had escaped.

He moved silently and painstakingly slowly towards the front door. The door gaped drunkenly on one leather hinge. The full moon rode high in the sky, and the moonlight that streamed in through the crack in the door and through the narrow windows provided enough illumination that he could see at least part of what lay around him on the floor.

David averted his gaze.

He crossed the floor, pushed open the door and stared at the carnage outside. The small homestead was a wreck. At sunset it had been a working farm. At midnight it was a jumble of dark trees and darker shadows and the glitter of moonlight on spilled blood. Woods loomed dark on three sides of the cabin. The forest was a fearful place, full of Indians and grizzly bears; but David would rather have faced a dozen grizzlies than the things that were inside his house.

He wished he had never welcomed the travelers in.

They'd arrived just after dusk; two skinny unshaven men; one of them little more than a boy; with cold eyes and lies of a lost path spoken in an oddly inflected version of Katya's mother tongue. David had been suspicious –he was suspicious of most things, and with good reason-but his wife had begged him to let the visitors stay.

As he stared at the bodies of his family tangled in the wreckage of their home, David wished that he had refused her. He wondered dully if it would have made any difference if he had.

_But I have paid the price for my laxity. God help me, I have paid_.

He waited for a moment and stepped out into the yard.

There was a tiny noise behind him.

David already knew that the strangers moved silently. In the split second between registering the noise and swinging around with his knife raised, David realized that the creature wanted him to know that it was there.

He had time only to feel a brief pang of fear.

The tall pale figure half-visible in the darkness behind him swayed like a rattlesnake and dodged the knife easily. David felt bright pain as the stranger hit him under the chin, snapping his head back and a deeper, darker instant of agony as the man-no, not a man, something _else_- stepped forwards and ripped his throat out.

***

The farmer's blood tasted of wood smoke and game, with a sharp, sweet dash of fear.

Eric savored the flavor.

He liked this new country; liked its pristine forests and lack of the industrial taint that had stained Europe for more years than he cared to remember. This was a new land, for all its ancient forests, and with new lands came new opportunities.

Eric had come up with Godric from the port at Charleston. They had travelled on foot from the coast to the North Carolina mountains. They hunted every night and slept through the day in caves bearded with lichen or buried deep in a millennium's worth of soft rotten pine needles. They'd slaughtered their way from farm to homestead to Indian encampment; killing natives and settlers alike. The Indians were feared by all right minded settlers, but they died just as easy as any Puritan and tasted much the same.

It had been Godric who spotted the lights and smoke of the isolated cabin. The family's attitude had changed from wariness to welcoming once they heard Eric's first few words of Swedish, and altered again once he showed his fangs.

The farmer in Eric's arms spasmed and twitched. His heels drummed on the boards for a second before he sagged limply into death. Eric heard the exact moment when the man's heart stopped beating. The thunder of his pulse faded, replaced by the noise of the cicadas chirping the heavy night away and the sound of Godric outside.

Eric felt rather than heard the words unfurl like heavy cloth in his mind.

_My child_, Godric said.

Eric let the farmer fall to the floor. The dead man dropped like a stone. What little of his blood was left seeped from the gash in his throat to stain the floorboards. Eric stooped under the low threshold and went to find his maker.

He found Godric outside, crouched upon a chopping-block with his knees pulled up to his chest and his tattoos stark black against his pale skin. There was blood matted in his hair and his eyes were dark as stones in the moonlight. He looked much as he had when Eric had first met him, seven hundred years ago.

"Master?" Eric asked carefully.

Godric said nothing. He just stared at the small field of corn that bordered the trail in front of the farmhouse. The crops were fenced in with a flimsy palisade of sticks. It was late summer. Even Eric, no farmer, could tell that the wheat was near ripe.

Eric hunkered down next to his maker and listened. Even crouching, his head was on a level with Godric's. It took him a fraction of a second to realize what had caught his maker's attention. There was a child hiding in the corn. A small child, eight or nine years old; a girl. Her heart beat fast as a frightened rabbit and her heels scuffed the soil as she struggled to stay still. Her breath only stirred the cornstalks a fraction, but it was enough.

Eric straightened. "Shall I chase her?"

"No." Godric said without turning his head or taking his eyes from the field.

Eric gritted his teeth. He could smell the tang of fresh blood that drifted from the house. The child's panicked breathing called to him. Her blood would be flavored with more fear than her father's. A different taste, but not unpleasant.

Godric cupped his hands around his mouth. "Run," he called. His voice was not loud, but it carried through the clear night air like a bell. The child broke cover within a few seconds

"A hunt, then," Eric said eagerly.

"No. Let her go." Godric held out a hand. It was not necessary; Eric could not go after her if Godric did not want him to. The command held him in place as the child vanished down the trail.

"She'll die anyway before she makes it to the next farm. And if she doesn't, then... "

"Be silent," Godric snapped.

The command stopped the next criticism before it left Eric's mouth. "You are merciful," he said when he could talk again.

Godric shook his head. "That's not mercy."

Eric frowned. Humans lived by killing deer and rabbits. Vampires were merely the next step in the food chain as far as he was concerned.

"I've killed thousands of men." Godric explained. "But I can choose. I can choose to be kind."

"Why should you be kind? They're _humans_."

Godric shrugged. He didn't answer. Instead he just stared at the spot on the trail where they had lost sight of the girl with a peculiar expression on his face.

Eric felt a stab of unease. Godric did _not_ show mercy. There was something wrong. "Why?" he asked again, "Is she ill? Diseased?"

Gidric shook his head. "No. Just because...because I can."

Eric snorted. "You think too much."

Godric didn't reply. Eric's sense of unease intensified. Godric was _old_.

It had been over seven hundred years since Eric had been turned. His descendants had been born, grown to adulthood, and then died. It was a difficult subject to think about, which was why Eric rarely bothered.

And Godric was much, much older; the crude scrawled tattoos on his body a relic of dark ages long gone. The Viking era was nearly lost in the mists of time, but Godric had been born a thousand years before. The older vampires got, the more they changed. Some got careless. Others went mad. Either path led to death.

Just like Eric could not have imagined living for more than fifty years or so when he was human, so vampire Eric found that he could never imagine what it would be like to live to Godric's age. Immortality, years of immortality, did strange things to any man. Or any vampire.

"Let's go up north," he said abruptly. Maybe there the white expanses of ice would wipe Godric's oddness away, in the savage north he would forget about kindness. They could wrap themselves in seal and wolf fur and feed on humans with the tang of salmon in their blood underneath a sky clean as ice. In the North the long winter nights never ended.

Godric wiped blood from his mouth absently. He said nothing, but he looked as if he was at least considering the idea. It was not Eric's place to give his master commands, but he was allowed to make suggestions.

"It's a long way," Godric said at last.

Eric shrugged. "We have time." Although he told himself that it was for Godric he wanted to go, in truth he was hungry for the scent of snow, for the long winter nights that never ended, for the dancing northern lights and the white bears that prowled the ice floes. "We could go west instead, if you like. Find the other ocean that you say's out there somewhere."

Godric shook his head. 'We'll go north," he said.

Eric nodded. His face showed no trace of the elation that he felt. North would be good for Godric. It would be good for both of them.

They left the cabin behind a few hours before sunrise and headed north, as promised. Godric led the way and Eric followed, until even the fading scent of blood and human flesh from the cabin was whipped away from the wind.

It was a long way north.

I hear something there in the shadow

Down the hall

Oh, you were a vampire

And now I am nothing at all.

Oh, you were a vampire...

And baby I'm the walking dead.

Concrete Blonde; Bloodletting (The Vampire Song)

Author's Notes:

Traveling wouldn't be easy for vampires, but they must have done something before houses were solid. It would have been a good way to pass the time. Set in North Carolina sometime in the 1700s.


End file.
